The best coping mechanism ever
We all have coping (or escaping?) mechanisms for times when things get overwhelming.
Sometimes, just waking up in the morning can be extremely overwhelming. I hear ya!
And sometimes, packing your life, organising tickets, playing with kids, prepping food, building websites while making phone calls, shopping for clothes and training elephants to dance can be a piece of cake.
I’ve found routine to be more overwhelming than even the grandest changes. But people are different. And usually, almost everyone can occasionally find something that is “too much”. And today, we bring our focus onto your response to this extreme.
Or, well, my response.
For as long as I can remember, my “go-to” response to overwhelm has been the world of fantasy. When I was 5 and my parents were arguing (which was almost always), I simply closed my eyes and took myself to a different world. It consisted of horses with golden manes and Sweden. Later in life, I ended up having my own 5 horses, and I also lived in Sweden for a period. With horses.
As I grew, my fantasies grew with me. When school was overwhelming, I ran to the theatre. I spent most of my childhood there: on stage and backstage, in basements and balconies. When no rehearsal or play was on, I drowned myself in books. Then movies. At one point, my mind was 50% of the time roaming around with vampires. A few weeks later, I was asked to be part of a photoshoot embodying a vampire. And when at one point, I was especially drawn to romantic books, I soon found myself in cliche situations having accidental picnics under falling stars or sharing a hotel room with only one bed with someone I barely knew.
These kinds of “real life taking over my fantasy” situations have always somehow completed these chapters for me. I think that my Greater Self knows it, and that’s her way of reminding me to come back to life. She plays it out for me in one way or another, and then it’s no longer a fantasy. It’s reality. And you can’t escape from reality into reality. Can you now?
Or so I thought. The most powerful and BEST coping mechanism I ever discovered was actually precisely that. At one point, when life just “got too much”, I started to escape into Presence. Instead of flying away, I submerged.
I observed raindrops falling on the window, the contours of teacups and tables and fireplaces, and the slight tilt of a chimney towards another one as if it wanted a hug. I started to feel into my hands and breathe. I felt into my steps, into the strain of my muscles. I relaxed into every chord of a Katie Melua song and tasted the bitterness of black coffee with extraordinary intensity. I escaped INTO the reality and away from “troubles”.
Back then, I still considered it escapism. After all, it was my way of stepping away from “being the responsible adult and thinking about how to earn more money”. But I soon realised that whenever I was in that space of what I now know to be the nondual realm, the door to the reality behind the illusion, things kinda seemed to work out for me. I started to feel better. Suffering didn’t seem important enough to waste my energy on it. I felt safe and protected. I felt connected to the most important things in life like water…and fire…and stones…
Sometime after, I met Eckhart Tolle, the most outstanding teacher of the Presence and the Power of Now in the Western World. Not in person (that may still come, thank you very much), but I happened to watch one of his long talks on the Purpose of Life. And he spoke about the primary and the secondary purpose. It was a 2h talk. 1h and 55min were dedicated to the primary purpose. 5min to the secondary one. And when I heard him explain, for those 115 minutes, that our primary purpose in life is to be present, is to be in the nondual realm in life and simply…be there, no matter what we may or may not do… I understood I wasn’t escaping at all. I was waking up. I was stepping away from the illusion that is overwhelm.
I had “accidentally” discovered the best coping mechanism that started to dissolve the perceived problems or at least the suffering that came with them and turned me into someone who could respond to the situations that came up in creative ways. Creative. As my ways were not and are still not usually logical to the everyday mind, yet they seem to be in tune with the greater flow.
Years later, I started to have energetic and telepathic conversations with nature from that same space: the elements, the rivers, the castles and the ocean. I’ve learned a great deal from them about life: parenting, marketing, belonging, abundance, acceptance, surrender and taking action. My animals speak to me in my dreams, and riding my horse through telepathic communication is the only way I now know how. What once seemed like a fantasy, a distant dream or impossibility, something I read from a book or saw in a movie, has now turned into Reality. The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell me - just like Rumi promised.
So. Now I recognise that when things get overwhelming, as they sometimes do, I can either respond by stepping out of reality or stepping fully into Reality. I can turn on the fight-flight/sympathetic nervous system, or I can relax into sense perceptions and allow the parasympathetic nervous system to take over and create flow. Both ways will allow me to leave my troubles and “solve this problem NOW” control mindset behind. Yet only one of them will actually allow these troubles to dissolve and connect me with the matrix of all creation.
All of my choices are safe. I am allowed to work my way through life in my own pace and the way I see fit.
And so are you.
Hi! I’m IIDALA aka Iida-Leena Materasu ,and I’m a professional therapist, writer, spiritual mentor, mother, woman, and human being, who has walked the path of healing for more than 20 years. I facilitate breathwork and nondual healing groups, offer courses, subscription programs, and silent nature hikes as well as receive clients one-on-one live and via zoom. To book a session or get more info on NONDUAL courses or programs, feel free to explore the website or contact me directly.